Harnessing the energy of provocative theories generated by recent understandings of the human body, the natural world, and the material world, Material Feminisms presents an entirely new way for feminists to conceive of the question of materiality. In lively and timely essays, an international group of feminist thinkers challenges the assumptions and norms that have previously defined studies about the body. These wide-ranging essays grapple with topics such as the material reality of race, the significance of sexual difference, the impact of disability experience, and the complex interaction between nature and culture in traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina. By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.
Stacy Alaimo is Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Susan Hekman is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Humanities at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Private Selves, Public Identities and The Future of Differences.
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory / Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman Part 1. Material Theory 1. Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance / Elizabeth Grosz 2. On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Politics of Unactualized Potential / Claire Colebrook 3. Constructing the Ballast: An Ontology for Feminism / Susan Hekman 4. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter / Karen Barad Part 2. Material World 5. Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms / Donna J. Haraway 6. Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina / Nancy Tuana 7. Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along? / Vicki Kirby 8. Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature / Stacy Alaimo 9. Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting: Thinking through (My Mother's) Body and Place / Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands Part 3. Material Bodies 10. Disability Experience on Trial / Tobin Siebers 11. How Real Is Race? / Michael Hames-Garcia 12. From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism / Suzanne Bost 13. Organic Empathy: Feminism, Psychopharmaceuticals and the Embodiment of Depression / Elizabeth A. Wilson 14. Cassie's Hair / Susan Bordo List of Contributors Index
Offers a robust understanding of materiality from a feminist point of view
"Specific, groundbreaking accounts of the material effects of ethical, political, scientific, environmental, and other cultural practices." Shannon Sullivan, The Pennsylvania State University
